Shell Programming and Scripting

How do I find a key word in multiple files.. in a directory.. ?

Code:

cat *.doc | grep -i myword?

Code:

grep myword *.txt

Your way would actually work, but wouldn't tell you which file things were found in. Probably not a good habit to use cat all the time anyway.

Code:

cat *.doc |xargs grep -i myword
find . -type f -name *.doc -exec grep -i mywork {} \;

Code:

 
find . -type f -name "*.doc" | xargs grep -i myword

---------- Post updated at 03:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:55 PM ----------

grep -R "myword" *
would do the needful .

With this command you can search the keyword even in the subdirectory files also .

Use ls instead of cat and -l option of grep would tell you which file-name contains the 'myword'

Code:

ls *.doc |xargs grep -li 'myword'

Or try a simple method as

Code:

grep -li 'myword' *.doc

That is a useless use of ls *. At best your the result is no different, and less efficient. Worst case, xargs will be confused by filenames with spaces when a simple *.doc would not.

It won't help fight "too many arguments" errors either. Feeding the too many arguments into ls instead of grep is still too many arguments. The way to not get too many arguments is to not use too many arguments, by using tools like find instead of shell globbing.